Digital Cipher No. 29

I. Music & Tech

Apple vs. Spotify for U.S. Supremacy

With 70 million paid users, compared to Apple’s 36 million Spotify has a clear lead in the streaming music arms race. However, a report early last month revealed that if left unaddressed, Apple’s 5% user growth rate in the U.S. will swiftly close that gap (at least stateside). While Spotify still seems to have the clear growth advantage in the global market their 2% growth rate in the U.S. continues to be exploited by Apple. Read more here.

Jay Z’s Robinhood Investment

Jay Z continues to handle his business with his company Arrive’s latest investment in stock trading app, Robinhood. The financial app’s latest valuation came in at 1.3 billion dollars and that was before the Robinhood platform announced the support of crypto trading (specifically Bitcoin and Ethereum). Read more about Jay Z and Arrive’s other investments here.

Vimeo

Last month Vimeo rolled out a suite of features intended to make it easier for creators distribute their content across all major social platforms. In addition to the ability to be able to publish to both Facebook and Youtube, they also gave users the ability to simultaneously live stream to platforms such as Twitch and Periscope. Read more about how Vimeo continues to enhance their position as a video creation tool here.

Twitter Investment Lost in SoundCloud

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey recently announced that Twitter would be writing off $66.4 million of the $70 million investment made in music streaming platform SoundCloud back in 2016, due to a strong likelihood they would not be able to recoup the funds in a “reasonable” amount of time. Having almost acquired SoundCloud back in 2014 for a whopping one billion dollars, Twitter seems to have history of demonstrated interest in the music streaming platform. Read more about the future of SoundCloud and music streaming here.

Spotify IPO is Official : 7 Revelations about Spotify

Roughly a week ago Spotify officiated their plans to go public with a detailed SEC filing that would run to 264 printed pages. Based on the numbers in the filing, the company has been valued at as much as about $23 billion in private trading. As noted in Digital Cipher No. 12 Spotify is undertaking a rare “direct listing”, which based on the undefined cap table means their share price could be much more volatile than a traditional IPO. Read about 7 very important details of Spotify’s business revealed by their official IPO filing here.